[Renegade 13]

Originally posted by Erax:
Actually, a few years back Canada pulled a 'Japan' on Brazil. They stopped importing Brazilian meat (which was no big deal, but then the US stopped too, which really hurt us) on the grounds that our herds were infected. It turns out that we had in fact had some cases of BSE, but they were limited to livestock imported from the UK just before the outbreak there. This UK livestock was slaughtered and disposed of and never hit the market. Animal protein has never been added to animal feed in Brazil. Canada sent a group of experts/inspectors over to check our herds before they resumed their imports.

When the whole story was over, there was a lot of suspicion in the air about the real, political motives for this.

Renegade, I wonder if your press ran this story over there at the time. Down here it was a major brouhaha. We even had a boycott on Canadian artists in the radio.

Well, I'm not sure if the Canadian press ran the story or not. I'd have been 12 or 13 at the time, and I didn't pay attention to the news . Isn't there still a ban on Brazilian beef imports to Canada?? Wait, I'm thinking of Argentina I think, and that's because of hoof and mouth disease, not BSE. My mistake.

There's one thing though. You mentioned some BSE infected cattle imported from Britain. The US did the same thing, however theirs were never tracked down. Personally, I think the US has cases, and simply doesn't have the testing facilities (or the will??) to be able to detect BSE. I think Canada and the States should stand together on this, and tell Japan to go f*** themselves. (No offense intended to any Japanese people reading this ) The only reason BSE is treated as a huge deal is because of the way Britain screwed up with their outbreak. A single case is really no big deal. It was contained. That should be the end of it. Or is the US more interested in placating Japan than their neighbors and friends to the north??